Building an Automation

Building an Engage automation only takes a few moments but offers you an unparalleled level of control over who you send emails to (and what those emails say!).

To get started, head to the automations page.

When you click the New Automation button, you'll be given two choices.

1. Create from a template - learn more about Engage templates here.
2. Create from scratch - follow the guide or video below.

Watch a video

Guide

There are several steps involved in building an automation that we'll explore in this guide. For each step, we'll explore the settings available.

Name & Resource

Resource: You can choose 'orders' or 'customers' (and 'subscriptions' if you use WooCommerce Subscriptions). The one you choose depends on what you want to automate.

For example, you'd choose  orders if you wanted to send an email one week after you get an order for a certain product. Or you'd choose customers if you wanted to email customers when they haven't ordered in 6 months but spent over $200.

Name: Give the automation a name for you to reference it by. Customers will not see this, just you.

Campaign: Optionally, you can assign the automation to a new or existing campaign, which can then be used for filtering your automations and keeping things organised.

Description: Optionally, you can give the automation a longer description that will show in the Metorik dashboard and help you remember what the automation does.

Audience

In this step, you get the chance define the audience of the automation. That is, what rules a customer or order should meet in order for it to receive an email.

As soon as a customer or order meets the defined rules, they'll get the email.

To build the rules, you use Metorik's segmenting system, which you can read about here.

Message

To Email: This setting lets you decide who should receive an email when an order or customer matches the rules. By default, it will email the customer, but optionally you can send an email to a custom address.

You'd use custom address if you wanted to email someone internally, like emailing a vendor when an order for a certain product is purchased, or notifying your team when a customer's activity looks suspicious (eg. joined in the last month but made 5+ orders).

You can currently only enter a single custom address. If you needed to send the email to two separate addresses, you could technically add the second email as a BCC in the advanced settings at the bottom of the page. If you wanted to send to more, you may want to consider setting up an email redirect with your email provider, that will redirect the email to multiple addresses.

For a detailed walk-through on some of the use cases of the  custom address field, check out our blog post - Metorik Engage's (not so) Hidden Feature.

From Email: Where emails should be sent from. If you've verified your domain during the Engage setup, you can easily send from any email on your domain. If not, you'll receive an email asking you to verify the new address before you can send from it.

Reply-to Email: When customers click the reply button, where should their replies go? You may want to set this to be a different address, like a help/support email, so you can receive email replies.

Subject: The subject of the email (customers will see this). You can use variables here to give the subject a bit of personalisation, like including the order number, or the customer name:

Layout: The design/layout of the email being sent. You can choose to use an email layout and then you just need to write the message (see below), or you can code the email completely from scratch with the custom HTML option.

If you choose to use an email layout, you'll find some default layouts provided by Metorik:

• Standard is a nice simple layout that puts your logo in the header of the email.
• Clean is a text-focused layout that looks similar to a plain text email, with no logo in the header.

But one of the coolest things about layouts is that you can build your own. To get started, head to the layouts page or learn more in the Layouts help doc.

Message: Time to write the actual email customers will receive! You can use variables, like we did with the subject above, as well as insert 'components' (depending on the resource being automated), like an order item table, shipping details, etc.

If you're using an email layout, you have access to a bunch of formatting options in the toolbar, as well as the ability to insert images and buttons.

At any time if you want to preview what the email will look like, click the Preview Email button in the top right. It will show you a preview right there on the page of the file email, as well as allow you to send an actual preview email to yourself or a team member.

Other Message Settings

You'll find some more settings below the message area.

Discount: Below the message form, you can optionally add a discount to an automation. Clicking the Add Discount button will open a dialog where you can configure the discount amount and restrictions. For more info on this, please read the Engage discounts help doc.

UTM Tracking: By default, we'll use the store-wide UTM settings but if you'd like, you can override these and set it for each email. For more info on this, please read the Engage UTM tracking help doc.

Custom CSS: If you want to add some basic custom styles to your Engage email, you can use the Custom CSS setting to do so. We'll automatically inline these styles alongside the layout's styles. For a detailed walkthrough on how to customise your Engage emails, check out Customising Engage emails with CSS.

Language/Locale: Under the Advanced tab, you can optionally set the language/locale, so the text Metorik shows in this specific automation (eg. dates, components, unsubscribe link, etc.) is in the correct language. For more info on this, please the Sending Engage emails in multiple languages help doc.

Extra

Send automation multiple times: If you're creating a customers or subscriptions automation, you'll find this setting. If checked, we will send an automation to a single customer or subscription multiple times. So whenever a customer stops matching the audience, but then later matches the audience an additional, separate time, we'll trigger the automation for them again.

For example, if you were emailing customers who last ordered more than 90 days ago, you'd probably want this to send multiple times so every time it had been 90 days that they hadn't ordered, the automation would trigger for them again.

More information can be found in the How many times will a customer receive an automation email? help document.

Activation

Now it's time to activate and send the automation! 🎉

Depending on how many orders/customers currently match the rules of the automation, you'll have the ability to send to the current matches as well as future matches.

More info can be found in the Automation Activation help doc.